On Romance and Intimacy PL
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Forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature ON ROMANCE AND INTIMACY Robert Klitgaard University Professor, Claremont Graduate University Claremont, CA 91711 [email protected] ABSTRACT We can’t seem to avoid romance and sex, except in works of philosophy. Why? How should we place romantic love and intimacy in a full human life? The jolt and surprise of romantic love, its physicality and yet its transporting otherworldliness, its radical unselfing, are signs and metaphors for meaning in life. Between extreme responses of the monk and the addict is what might be called a heroic take. Romantic love goes right when we gratefully allow it to manifest itself in our calling, our insight, and our sharing and service. 1 On Romance and Intimacy Suddenly, my research was brusquely interrupted by romance. Conceptually, that is. The precipitant was an essay by Becca Rothfeld about the collected letters of Iris Murdoch. Murdoch was a philosopher at Oxford who strayed, and flourished, as a novelist. “Her scholarly area was ethics, and her primary preoccupation was love, both romantic and platonic,” Rothfeld writes. “This was a topic whose manifest importance she felt was chronically neglected by her peers, most of them analytic philosophers.”1 Murdoch is right, I thought. Socrates and friends, lolling around the Symposium talking about beauty and boys, downplayed the physical side of romantic love (thus “Platonic love”). Dante chastely chased his beloved Beatrice into paradise. Romantic love is not featured in the philosophy of, say, Immanuel Kant.2 Didn’t someone once say it’s impossible even to imagine a Mrs. Kant, a Mrs. Socrates, a Mrs. NietZsche? Ah, NietZsche. It is said that he was once smitten, that he so informed the young lady most awkwardly, then proposed marriage to her in a letter delivered through a friend who also liked her: a letter she never answered, perhaps never received (soon she had started living with the friend).3 Is that why in The Gay Science NietZsche says that women always put on an act, men must dominate, and romantic love is just an illusion, “the most ingenuous expression of egoism,” a manifestation of that acting and that pretense of dominating?4 And so, I grabbed some of Murdoch’s work, and I sent an email of praise to Rothfeld. She turned out to be finishing her first year as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard. What, so young and already so wise? Which may recall a line by the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli—who at age 22 had written a 237-page monograph on quantum mechanics that is still used today—concerning a youthful candidate for a faculty position: “So young and he has already contributed so little?”5 2 Later I was visiting Harvard and invited Rothfeld to have breakfast. I asked her how she thought philosophy should incorporate romantic love. She said—please forgive me, Ms. Rothfeld, for this summary that reflects my ignorance more than your answer—“I don’t know.” I didn’t, either. But clearly Murdoch and Rothfeld were right. Romantic love is part of the ideal of a full human life for many people. Including me. And yet, I had left it out of my research entirely. In a book I am writing, Thomas à Kempis is the foil for a view of a full human life that, well, avoids being fully human. His book The Imitation of Christ (1442) was directed at his fellow monks, even though it became the most read book in Christianity apart from the Bible.6 Avoid the world out there, Thomas admonished again and again; it is a threat to your life in Christ. He didn’t mention romance and intimacy, but he did warn against women. “If I were you boys, I wouldn’t talk or even think about women. It ain’t good for your health.” Actually, that’s not Thomas à Kempis speaking. It’s Howard, the saintly old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But Thomas would concur. In contrast to this monkish avoidance of the world, my research considers the addict, or rather an extreme type of addict, someone prone to grab and grab some more of what he wants in the world, someone voracious and, eventually, insatiable. It is controversial among scientists whether a person can have an “addiction” to sex and romantic conquest.7 Whatever: in my exaggeration, the addict ends up alone in a cell. It is not the cell of a monk, but both experience a kind of living death. Beyond the monk and the addict, I have been investigating a different ideal type, a hero8 found in many traditions around the world in many forms and legends. Here is the pattern: • The hero receives a calling. 3 • The hero discovers or is sent an insight that is specific to him or her and also resonates with the challenges of many. • And the hero responds by sharing and serving, not remaining in a cell or in a castle but foraying out into the real world. The hero is an archetype of a full human life. And now, prodded by Becca Rothfeld and Iris Murdoch, I venture to consider how romantic love and intimacy might fit. First, a reminder. In this endeavor, we’re not describing neurological states; not statistically charting how many of what kinds have how much; and not calculating cultural, socioeconomic, or historical correlations. We do not aspire to necessary or sufficient conditions for a full human life. We’ve been working schematically, impressionistically. “Consider a kind of hero who… And even though you and I are not heroes, let’s see what we might learn.” And then, an acknowledgement of awkwardness. Romantic love is entwined with sex, a subject notoriously difficult to approach deftly. Some of us have more trouble with the subject than others. The anthropologist Raymonde Carroll wrote that Americans can’t stand it when French friends go on and on about their sexual conquests (and the French can’t abide the American tendency to blab about money). 9 But French, Americans, whoever nowadays: even if we feel uncomfortable, we can’t seem to get away from romance and sex. They are everywhere. LOVE LIFE LOW AND HIGH For example, the other day while browsing the anything-but-sexy website TechCrunch.com, I came across a news story with this opening paragraph: “Let’s admit it, you probably aren’t reading that romance novel for the plot. Or its literary value. Audible knows this, and is today launching a new collection of romance-themed 4 audiobooks that come with a handy feature that let’s you skip right to the action. Called ‘Take Me to the Good Part,’ the feature will fast-forward you to the steamy section...”10 Ah, those steamy sections. But they’re not just in trash novels. Audible® might consider adding Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, written around 1350.11 Joan Acocella calls The Decameron “probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon.”12 Like romance novels today, The Decameron was written for “gracious ladies” and “amiable ladies” fascinated by the passions of love. “I offered this effort of mine,” says the narrator at the end, “to ladies living in idleness rather than to anyone else… to dispel the melancholy with which ladies are afflicted.” In The Decameron ten friends go wandering in the Florentine countryside. Each day for ten days, each one tells a story to the rest about an assigned topic, such as cleverness or generosity. The resulting 100 tales cover over 800 pages. Most of the stories include saucy accounts of sexual encounters, using euphemisms like “beating the fur,” “delightedly making the nightingale sing over and over again,” and “since they had only traveled six miles that night, they went two more before they finally got out of bed.” One unfaithful wife spends her first night with “a handsome, lusty young man” teaching him “how to sing a good half-dozen of her husband’s hymns.” One of the longer stories is the saga of Alatiel, a woman so beautiful that she cannot escape the passions she inflames over a series of husbands and lovers, some of whom kill each other for her. There is a happy-ever-after when, finally, she becomes the wife of the King of Algarve. “Although she had slept with eight men perhaps ten thousand times, she not only came to the King’s bed as if she were a virgin, but made him believe she really was one, and for a good many years after that, lived a perfectly happy life with him as his Queen.” 5 The Decameron’s narrator reports that, as they were hearing this tale, “the ladies sighed repeatedly over the lovely lady’s various misadventures, but who knows what may have moved them to do so? Perhaps some of them sighed as much out of a desire for such frequent marriages as out of pity for Alatiel.” In another story, a lovely, “lofty” lady overflows with passion. She is not punished for cheating on her husband because, she has the husband admit before the judge and audience, she never ever turned him down for sex, as many times as he wanted. Then she asks the judge and audience, “If he’s always obtained what he needed from me and was pleased with it, what was I supposed to do—in fact, what am I supposed to do now—with the leftovers. Should I throw them to the dogs? Isn’t it much better to serve some of them up to a gentleman who loves me more than his very own life than to let them go to waste or have them spoil?” It’s a story of true love—but yes, it’s her allusion to steamy leftovers that make her audience laugh.